Deconstructing The Patrix

I’m in an odd place because I left behind all the guideposts I used to rely on the explain the world and shape my views and behavior. I have gone into the Outer Darkness, far beyond what I leaned from all the philosophers and gurus and I don’t believe ANY of it anymore. I see now that ALL of it was presented from the male point of view, everything I learned, everything I read, except for the work of a few feminist authors and teachers.

The only teaching that has any value is the one that directs me to become aware of my body and my breathing and to work on maintaining my awareness in the present, here and now.

I am keenly aware of just how powerless I am to affect what is happening on this planet. Some moments I desperately want to be released from this disaster, but at others, like right now, I’m just grateful that my own little life makes some sense and has beauty in it.

It would be great to stop taking patriarchy so personally.The whole point of rape culture is to reduce me to an object, a non-agent. My “beingness,” my uniqueness, my personhood is irrelevant.

Men seek revenge on women because men can’t have babies. This is the whole primal truth of the matter. This truth is rabidly suppressed, just like the truth about climate change and the mass die-off of pollinators from industrial petrochemicals, for instance. These are truths that I am never allowed to speak aloud in public. People do not want to hear it. It makes them uncomfortable to hear the truth.

I spoze I need to write another blogpost about this – about Marge Piercy’s conjecture that technology will solve this problem of male jealousy over women’s reproductive capacity by growing babies in artificial wombs and shooting up men with female hormones so they can breastfeed, as she proposed in her book, Woman On The Edge Of Time. Tranzing is the tech solution to inequality between the sexes and this is a problem because medical science and technology are capitalist, masculinist enterprises and as such, don’t particularly care about women and the natural world, which are simply “resources” that exist to make profit from.

I’m coming to accept that I’m not responsible for patriarchy. I didn’t cause it and I can’t cure it, as they say around the 12-step groups that deal with addiction. It seems that my yelling at the delusional masses in online forums (and frantic emails to former women-only spaces like rape crisis centers that now permit men who say they are women into their support groups) is just my attempt to blow off steam in my mind-shattering grief over what is taking place, over the harm that is being done to women and the very basis of life on earth, and for all the life that is being lost.

The violence that I have been subjected to throughout my life from this rapist culture gave me a distorted sense of responsibility. I am not responsible for patriarchy and it’s brainless, gynocidal, SUICIDAL ecocide.

A patriarchal family is a slave family and is a shame-based family because shame is what molds people into slavery. All of the implied and actual violence is deliberate and intended to produce shame within individuals such that they are unable to stop the violence. The Circle of Death.

I am still coping with the injuries I sustained in my marriage. The man I married is an automaton who acts out a rigid role. I used to explain his behavior by the fact that he grew up with an alcoholic father. I did not exist as a living, autonomous sentient being. I was also only a ROLE, an object, an economic unit, as he actually stated about me and our children. I was a function and a means to his own ends.

About a year ago I was trying to write about addiction and slavery and attachment theory and was unable to find the heart in it…because I was not consciously considering the role of male supremacy and rape culture. Male privilege is always the elephant in the living room. It’s the silent oppressive fog that surrounds all of our social structures. So I wasn’t able to put together the severed parts, I had a jumble of facts, but the essence was missing.

Ten thousand years of female slavery shaped the relations between my ex-husband and me. He was grown the same way that my father and brothers and all males are made, secure in their positions of dominance over women and their right to our labor, our bodies, the products of our wombs, our care and attention.

I could not be a moral agent until I was able to walk away from all of this. I could not be responsible until I was able to separate myself from the constant violence from males that shaped my choices. Instead of being sorrowful I know I need to be grateful that I woke up and that I have this opportunity to come to real life, to the real world, dying as it is. I still have this moment of autonomy and clarity.

“WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ONE WOMAN TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT HER LIFE?
THE WORLD WOULD SPLIT OPEN.”

Since all indications point to the fact that we are living in a virtually inescapable trap that I have come to call The Patrix , and that this trap, this machine, is busily in the process of destroying all capacity of the Earth to sustain life, I have decided it is time for me to lay out my own truth. There is nothing left to lose. It is time to split the world open.

Deconstructing The Patrix

The Patrix (a Gaia University coinage meaning the ‘patriarchal matrix’ or matrix of oppression) is an ever present, potent and frequently invisible shape-maker of human cultures. It consists of thousands of dysfunctional thought patterns (memes) that function as a mutually supporting complex, interlocking system. These memes are installed in our individual, community, and cultural operating systems sometimes by contagion or by accident, and more often by patterns of oppression.

Silencing

My father threatened me over and over that if I told anyone what he was doing to my body that I would lose my family. To a three-year-old child this is nothing less than a death threat, a threat that I would be ostracized out in the wilderness and die of starvation. He was not lying to me. I have lost my entire family, the one I was born into as well as the one that I created from my body, because I would not shut up about being raped and beaten by my father, from early infancy until my mother died of DES-related cervical cancer when I was twelve years old.

When I first began blogging in 2012 it was my hope to be able to post actual entries from my daily journal online. I chose not to do this out of concern for the privacy of family members with whom I still maintained contact. But I have had to separate myself from even these individuals because they continued to be abusive toward me.

I will be placing these entries under their own heading (My Journal) in order to distinguish them from my other work and interests.

So, here goes:

October 8, 2016

My first though upon waking this morning was about the similarity between my daughter’s and my mother’s behavior, how I cringed in their presence, how they made me feel inferior and unsafe and unwanted. They both very much wanted me dead.

I woke up this morning with the thought that my parents actually tortured me. I am who and what I am because of the torture I endured throughout my childhood. This is why I always resonated with stories about what the worldwide androcratic religion has done to women everywhere throughout history – murdering widows in India, butchering vulvas in Africa and the Near East, burning “witches” during The Enclosure Movement of the Middle Ages. It is because I physically lived this kind of mindbinding torture every day of my childhood.

All of the torture was intended to prepare me for an adulthood of being eaten alive, exploited and then discarded by men and by my children.

It wasn’t persona, and it wasn’t even particularly conscious – it was reflexive on the part of my caretakers. Because, of course, my mother had, herself, been tortured and exploited all through her own life.

The way I see it now we were of the social class known as “cannon-fodder.” Boys were raised to be fighters and soldiers in the endless patriarchal wars of acquisition of land, women and resources, and girls were raised to service the soldiers. This was fairly explicit. I was beaten many times for screwing up household chores and told I would be subject to the same from my future husband if I didn’t straighten up. And I watched my father beat my mother over and over for minor infractions of household service.

That was the pattern. So, of course I blindly married into a military family (my father-in-law was a veteran, both brothers-in-law were lifetime military men,) even though MY soldier wore a white collar and became a different kind of government functionary. He axed people’s jobs instead of their throats.

All humans are now under a spell brought about by deep conditioning and virtually nobody is awake and aware and able to act freely. My recurring childhood nightmare of being the only one left alive after the bomb falls seems to literally true. It’s as if I am the only one awake in a world full of automatons.

I knew it as a child, I knew it then and I know it now. I have been frantically searching for others who are awake. I see a spark sometimes, but these moments fade quickly and they add to my despair. No-one seems to be able to maintain the fire of truth and PRESENCE. The conditioning we are subjected to all our lives is absolute.

The Target

What I am remembering is always being my mother’s target, never knowing when she would, without warning, reach out and slap me hard across the face. I never knew what behavior would make her hit me. I was always in a heightened state of tension, just waiting for the blows. The cruelty of this was that my anxiety would make me clumsy and that enraged her even more.

And there was the torture of the “medical procedures” I was subjected to, for instance the frequent enemas and being laid naked on the floor to be swathed in the sulfur laden cotton batting they was supposed to heal the rash between my legs. (I had that rash from my father’s beard as he rubbed my genitals and inner thighs raw, but I was under threat of death not to tell.) The torture of the sexual abuse and being held responsible for this abuse and all of the drudging housework I was forced to do for my father and brothers, because I was female and my mother was dying of cancer from DES exposure (Which was a form of medicalized male violence against women.)

Psychopaths

My father was a psychopath in a culture designed and forcible perpetuated by psychopaths. The worst thing about this for me was that my brutal early conditioning led me to become the victim of these types of individuals throughout my life, from my lovers, my husband, the pill-proffering doctors, my own children. The behavior seems so familiar. I misinterpret the words and actions of these people as care and concern because I was dependent on monsters for food and shelter as a child. The attentions of vampires feel like love.

My ex-husband and my last and only lover after him were both this type of man. They were identical in their beliefs about their natural entitlement and my existence as an object to be exploited for personal gain. I am still not clear about how both of my daughters came to be psychopaths. The closest explanation I can come up with is the dynamic that exists throughout patriarchy whereby daughters witness their mothers being tortured and are tortured BY their mothers in many cases. Girl children react to this by dis-identifying with their mothers and holding rage toward them.

I kept trying to force my daughters to look at all of this. But the damage was too deep. They refuse to see the pattern. My daughters are ruined. They will never emerge from the evil enchantment they are under. They will never question who are the actual agents of the destruction. They won’t even face the fact that the destruction has taken place, that it was deliberate and calculated. That is was done by my grandfather, who protected his pedophile son and paid for the doctors and lawyers who testified against me in court when I was nine years old. It was done by my father, by their alcoholic grandfather, by their own narcissistic father, by the cops and the judges and the doctors and the CEO’s and politicians.

Internecine Destruction

Patriarchy has won its internecine battle and all life on Earth is now threatened with extinction.I am now able to make the connection that the abuse and torture that we were all subjected to as schoolkids was directly analogous to what was happening “in private” in my house. We were continually threatened with mass annihilation, we were controlled on the minutest levels by ritual shaming and the threat of humiliation if we stepped out of line.

That’s what the nuke drills were intended to do to the entire population. This was the purpose behind being put in restrictive desk seats in precise rows inside of concrete and brick boxes. Patriarchal terrorism at it’s finest: domestic abuse in the home, psychological torture in the schools.

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One thought on “Deconstructing The Patrix”

I am so grateful for women like yourself who tell their stories so that the silence around this can be shattered enough so that at the very least we can find each other and hold onto one another for a bit of support and validation in our experiences.